3/2/92 Reading A.Amin javaheri
'Reading ' Since the history of language learning has had an enormous influence onhow reading has been viewed over the past decades. Reading within an environmentalist approach: Up to the end of the 1960s the field of language learning was dominated by environmentalist ideas that avoided speculation about the workings of the human mind and concentrated only on observable facts outside the person. Under such an influence, reading was viewed primarily as a passive, perceptual process. Readers were decoders of symbols printed on a page and they translated these symbols into the corresponding word sounds before they could construct the author’s intended meaning from them . Reading within an innatist approach: By the mid 1960s reading practitioners were wondering how an innatist position would work in studying the acquisition of reading and a new generation of reading research began to test that idea. This research came mainly from the work carried out in psycholinguistics and in particular from the work of Goodman (1965, 1967) and Smith (1971). Goodman (1965) conducted one of the first studies to explain the role of errors or miscues ''(Goodman 1965) made by readers when reading aloud and his experiment resulted in two important findings. First, learners were able to read a far greater number of words in context than without a context (i.e., word lists). Second, miscues were due to the reader’s intention to make sense from the written text. Reading within an interactionist approach: By the late 1970s researchers were attempting to identify comprehension skills. This significant change, though, grew out of the interactionist approach to language learning and, particularly, from the work carried out essentially in the disciplines of cognitive psychology and sociolinguistics. In the cognitive psychology field, researchers started to conduct studies on basic processes in reading. They analyzed what happened during the reading act and they incorporated notions of how readers represented text in memory. A major development within this field was the emergence of story grammars. '''Teaching reading within a communicative competence framework ' Discourse competence: the core of the proposed framework of communicative competence is the reading skill since it the manifestation of interpreting written discourse and a way of manifesting the rest of the components. Discourse competence involves the knowledge of written discourse features such as markers, cohesion and coherence as well as formal schemata. Linguistic competence: Linguistic competence consists of the elements of the linguistic system such as grammar rules and knowledge of vocabulary. Moreover, the ability to read also involves the mastery of the mechanics of the language, such as the alphabet and punctuation. Pragmatic competence: Pragmatic competence involves an understanding of the illocutionary force of an utterance by being aware of situational and participant variables within which the utterance takes place, as well as politeness issues. This competence has been regarded as essential to understanding spoken communication in which the social contextual factors are explicit. Intercultural competence: Intercultural competence refers to the knowledge of how to interpret written texts appropriately within their sociocultural context. Therefore, it involves knowledge of the cultural factors such as knowledge of the sociocultural background of the target language community, knowledge of dialects, and cross-cultural awareness. Strategic competence: Strategic competence has been added to all above-described competencies, since it has been regarded as crucial to the development of reading skills This competence refers to the possession of both communication and learning strategies. 'Implications for reading instruction from reading research ' Over the past 10 years, a set of implications for L2 reading instruction has emerged from overviews of the research literature. These implications provide a way to examine how research supports effective reading-instruction practices, and how teaching, materials development, and curriculum design could become more effective. 1. Ensure word recognition fluency 2. Emphasize vocabulary learning and create a vocabulary-rich environment 3. Activate background knowledge in appropriate ways 4. Ensure effective language knowledge and general comprehension Skills 5. Teach text structures and discourse organization 6. Promote the strategic reader rather than teach individual strategies 7. Build reading fluency and rate 8. Promote extensive reading 9. Develop intrinsic motivation for reading ' ' 'Reading strategies ' Over the last 30 years or so, already many different reading strategies have been identified. strategies can be categorized into metacognitive (including purpose-oriented, comprehension monitoring, and strategies that focus on learning from text), cognitive (including strategies for interacting with the author and the text, strategies involving different ways of reading, strategies for handling unknown words, and those making use of one’s prior knowledge in some way), as well as social and affective strategies, among others. The picture that is beginning to form of good strategy users from the reading research is that they are “strategic,” which means that they: - Are primarily focused on the drive to obtain ''meaning ''from a text, not on “using strategies”. - Are aware of their ''purpose ''for reading, whether it be for pleasure, for obtaining important information needed to perform a task (e.g., for performing a procedure, writing a paper, making a decision), or to learn something new (Pressley 2000; Grabe and Stoller 2002). Within that context, then, they tailor their strategies specifically to fit the particular task involved . - Overview a text to decide if it is relevant to their purpose and to identify the portions that might be particularly relevant or helpful (Pressley 2000). They then read selectively, focusing on those parts of the text that are most relevant to their purpose (Ediger 2000). - Use strategies in ordered hierarchies that are generated from an analysis of the steps in the process needed to accomplish their task (Pressley and Woloshyn 1995). - Know and utilize ''multiple ''strategies, including cognitive, metacognitive, affective, and other types, integrating and orchestrating their use in relation to each other, and then evaluating their effectiveness in achieving the purpose (Block 1986; Oxford 1994); Well-tailored combinations of strategies are more effective than single strategies . - Make use of, and integrate their prior knowledge, not only of the world, but also of the nature of texts, and of how they have used different strategies for different purposes in the past, to help them make sense of what they read (Block 1986; Pressley et al. 1992). Having prior world. knowledge and knowledge of the topic of a text influences which strategies they need to use (Afflerbach 1990) and the effectiveness of the strategy use . - Make particularly effective use of metacognitive strategies, the “higherlevel thinking” (or “thinking about how one is thinking”), the monitoring system that readers use in order to direct and control their overall strategy use. They use metacognitive strategies for planning, selecting and using strategies, monitoring comprehension and effectiveness of strategy use, and learning . - Make effective use of varying strategies for handling unknown vocabulary, with the quality of their strategy use more important than the quantity, and in relation to the various sources of knowledge they have available for inferring meaning (Nassaji 2003). - Differ in their use of strategies, depending on their gender, language and cultural background, age, beliefs, motivations, or learning style (Oxford 1996). - Know if their strategy use was effective or not by assessing whether they were able to accomplish their purpose .